In the event of an oxygen shortage on airplanes, mothers of young children are always reminded to put on their own oxygen mask fir...st, to better assist the children with theirs. The same tactic is necessary on terra firma. There's no way of sustaining our children if we don't first rescue ourselves. I don't call that selfish behavior. I call it love.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Treading the soil of the moon, palpating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one's sto...mach the separation from terra ... these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known ... this is the only thing I can say about the matter. The utilitarian results do not interest me.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

As the light increased, I discovered around me an ocean of mist, which by chance reached up exactly to the base of the tower, and ...shut out every vestige of the earth, while I was left floating on this fragment of the wreck of a world, on my carved plank, in cloudland; a situation which required no aid from the imagination to render it impressive. As the light in the east steadily increased, it revealed to me more clearly the new world into which I had risen in the night, the new terra firma perchance of my future life.... All around beneath me was spread for a hundred miles on every side, as far as the eye could reach, an undulating country of clouds, answering in the varied swell of its surface to the terrestrial world it veiled. It was such a country as we might see in dreams, with all the delights of paradise.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

A book should contain pure discoveries, glimpses of terra firma, though by shipwrecked mariners, and not the art of navigation by ...those who have never been out of sight of land. They must not yield wheat and potatoes, but must themselves be the unconstrained and natural harvest of their author's lives.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The houses were few and far between, besides being small and rusty, though they appeared to be kept in good repair, and their door...-yards, which were the unfenced Cape, were tidy; or, rather, they looked as if the ground around them was blown clean by the wind. Perhaps the scarcity of wood here, and the consequent absence of the wood-pile and other wooden traps, had something to do with this appearance. They seemed, like mariners ashore, to have sat right down to enjoy the firmness of the land, without studying their postures or habiliments. To them it was merely terra firma and cognita, not yet fertilis and jucunda.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

While the very inhabitants of New England were thus fabling about the country a hundred miles inland, which was a terra incognita ...to them,... Champlain, the first Governor of Canada,... had already gone to war against the Iroquois in their forest forts, and penetrated to the Great Lakes and wintered there, before a Pilgrim had heard of New England.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »